


to love a wild thing is

by Tailish



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Avengers: Endgame - SteveTony Prompt Party, Canon Divergence - Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Crying, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Happy Ending, Hopeful Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Prompt Fill, because y'all have had time to see it by now, i removed the spoiler tags
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-05
Updated: 2019-06-05
Packaged: 2020-04-08 11:34:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19106275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tailish/pseuds/Tailish
Summary: Her husband, who had flown around in a metal suit and gotten himself killed fighting a purple alien from space in a battle that still sometimes felt like the end of the world, and this man, the national icon frozen in ice for over seventy years and still looking like he’s thirty, in love like Romeo and Juliet.Prompt fill forAvengers: Endgame - SteveTony Prompt Party: Steve doesn't stay in the past and comes back and is there for Morgan as she grows up - Pepper figures out later that he was in love with Tony but never says anything.





	to love a wild thing is

**Author's Note:**

>   
>   
>   
>   
>   
> This turned out a lot more Pepper-centric than I think the prompt asked for, but I hope you like it.
> 
> I had a really hard time properly developing how both Pepper and Steve would handle the grief of losing Tony. Neither of them are perfect people in this, but especially Pepper has a hard time handling Tony’s death, and this sometimes reflect in how she behaves towards Morgan. I hope that it turned out somewhat realistically and that you like it, anon!
> 
> Edit 22-09-2019: Removed spoiler warnings for Endgame from the summary. Y'all better have seen it by now.

**THE ENDING**

 

The first week, she didn’t see Steve at all. She didn’t see anyone at all, not really. Happy was there, and he tried, just as Rhodey tried, but they’d both lost Tony too - all of them were mourning him. She knew that they knew that she’d always thought it’d end this way. Ever since she’d seen him get off that plane, fifteen - had it really been fifteen? - years ago, and watched Tony hold the world by the balls to save it, she’d known that there would be no way he would stop while there was still evil.

 

But it wasn’t _fair_ , not with Morgan and everything that they’d built up in the last five years. That they would loose everything, so soon and so cruelly. She wasn’t good to Morgan that first week, either. Morgan, who didn’t know where her daddy had gone, and whom she couldn’t look at without seeing his clever, witty eyes. Happy took her, at some point, because Rhodey was with he rest of the Avengers trying to coordinate - everything, and Peter had lost a father too, and she couldn’t. 

 

She woke up the first morning, alone, and promptly burst into tears. 

 

She went down stairs to make breakfast, and found his stylus and holotech scattered all over the drafting table, still showing a calculation for the space-time Zukowski Eigenvalue under a three-h Kamps quantum fluctuation. Then she cried again, because the only reason she knew what the calculation was had been him. 

 

It was the same with the dirty boots not quite next to the doormat, and the henley, and the guest bathroom, in which there was no particular object of Tony’s scattered around, but in which there never would be, either. It was as if there was ghost in the house, only a ghost would at least be present. Tony just wasn’t there any more.

 

The second morning, she didn’t get out of bed until Happy came to get her because Morgan was crying downstairs. Then Happy took Morgan away and she went back to bed. 

 

The third morning was the funeral. 

 

It was a wonderful funeral, some part of her registered. Private and tastefully done. The flowers were a nice touch. Tony had always joked about parades and parties for his funeral, but this was maybe what he really would have wanted - to see that he had loved people and that those people had loved him. Rhodey had dug up Tony’s first arc reactor from somewhere, the one she’d had framed, to put on the bouquet. She hadn’t even known that it had survived the Malibu explosion. Part of her wanted to grab it and keep it, because it had been Tony’s and hers in a way that so little things had been. He’d smiled at her, that first time she’d had to grab into his chest and change the reactors, and told her that things would be fine. And then she’d made him the reactor and smiled at him and that had been their little thing, him having a heart despite his not knowing and others not seeing. But now there were others and they were standing behind her, and so she put the reactor on the bouquet and let it float out into the lake. 

 

She found out later that Steve had been the one to carry the body off the battlefield.

 

They watched his message, afterwards. She hated his technology because he looked so alive and so real, sitting backwards on a chair the way he always did because he knew it annoyed her and amused her in equal measure. Most of the last part of the message was aimed at Morgan, clearly, who would be growing up without a father now, and that was of course the right decision because Morgan was four, and she didn’t need to be carrying around the guilt of a dead parent. Really, it was wise of Tony, to have foreseen the need. And the first part was for the world, obviously, who would always want a piece of Tony, and he would always give it to them, so that made sense. 

 

It made sense. 

 

But it wasn’t fair, she’d been here for him all this time, even before Iron Man, she’d had him and he’d been hers despite all the odds, despite the rumours and the ‘evidence’ and everything, they’d had each other, and afterwards too, when she couldn’t believe that he was still alive and when there’d been the alcohol and the acting out like a fucking disturbed teenager but she’d put up with it and smiled and loved him and he had loved her - and with the Mandarin and everything he’d always been a little insane but he’d been hers and the Avengers had taken that away, taken him away from her and he said that he would be back and he wouldn’t go but then he put on the fucking suit again and it had killed him, Ultron and then the Civil War, they’d killed him but she’d allowed it and had done nothing to stop it because it would have hurt him worse not to go and then he’d have left her if she wouldn’t let him go so she’d let him go and he’d died like she knew he would but she couldn’t let him leave her and now he was dead and he still belonged to them and to the world more than to her even though she’d let him go and it had killed her to do that and it wasn’t fucking fair. 

 

The fourth morning Peter came to visit, and he showed her a video file stored in the Mark-52 helmet that had been to space with Tony with her name in the header, and then they both cried. It was all sorts of awkward at first because she was at least thirty-five years older than him and although he’d seen Tony as a father, she knew, May was his mother and they’d never really been that close, but then tears had started leaking from his eyes too while he watched her watch the video **,** and they had hugged.

 

The fifth morning she videoconferenced with SI and held a press interview. She wasn’t sure who had written the eulogy she read out, but it was really quite flattering and professional. Tony would have hated it. Then, because international finance conglomerates stopped for no man, she had a meeting with the Board of Directors that went on for four hours. Then she talked to the Regional President in Asia and the Director of Sales and Supply, and the R&D team on Hygienics and Aquatics. She turned around to call up the stairs if Tony knows about the production line issue at the Monterrey plant and waited for at least three seconds before she remembered and cried again, on a live call with an entire working group and five independent experts. 

 

The sixth morning she realised she hadn’t cried so much in years, and felt vaguely ashamed. 

 

The seventh morning Steve came to the house. She almost closed the door in his face, but he had Morgan on one arm, sleeping. He didn’t meet her eyes, just looked over her left shoulder instead. 

 

“Mrs,” was as far as he got before choking up. Steve had the wide-eyed look of someone who’d had too little sleep and too much grief heaped on him in the past week. She thought she probably looked the same. His jaw was clenched and he squeezed his eyes a little bit, almost like he was squinting, before he dropped his head and looked down at the floor. She watched as he took a breath. Then another.

 

“Mrs,” he tried again, but couldn’t continue, and then he was crying on her doorstep, and she watched as he curled in and around Morgan in his arms, shoulders shaking and breath gasping. She thought he might be trying to control himself and stop crying by tensing up, but it wasn’t really working. She’d never really seen him so emotional before. Steve had never been anything but professional and polite when she was around. 

 

They stood on opposite sides of the doorstep until Morgan woke up, poked Steve’s face, and asked him why he was so sad. Then she turned around in his arms and saw her and cried, Mommy! Steve put her down on the ground, the top of his head shockingly blond against Morgan’s pitch black hair, and she ran up to her and hugged her around the knees. For a few seconds Pepper stood frozen on the porch, 

 

“Mommy, mommy, why’s daddy not coming back?” Morgan asked. “I want him back!”. Then Pepper sat down on the floor as well and hugged Morgan, eyes dry, while Steve knelt opposite her, crying on the porch.

 

**THE MIDDLE**

 

When Morgan went to primary school things were still not normal, but they were more normal than before. Thanos had done a number on the world, but worse had been the effects of the snap themselves. She knew that she had been one of the lucky ones, both times around - wealthy enough not to starve, influential enough to know what was happening. Most civilians hadn’t been aware of what was happening for hours, if not days or weeks. The roads were up and running and so was the electricity, but there was so much to be done, not only at SI but everywhere in the entire world. Dear god, the famine the first winter had been horrible, and mortality rates were still sky high. It had taken the world over two years after the Snap to rebuild something resembling a stable global distribution of resources, and that had been easier because then there had been too much stuff and too little people, but now there were too many people and much too little production and it seemed quite frankly impossible to manage. Somehow, a fair share of the brunt work had fallen on the Avengers and, in extension, their affiliates. 

 

At first, she found it a little strange how often she saw Steve and the other Avengers in person. She sometimes thought that everything would be easier if they would just stay out of her way and make her stop thinking about - Tony, but there was too much to be done in too little time, and it was good not to be idle. Before everything, she’d never interacted with the Avengers that much, but now that the entire world needed managing they had to work together because although none of them had any idea in the slightest of how supply chains worked, they were the people who could convince everyone else to help out with rebuilding the world. 

 

It was a strange kind of job, because sometimes the Avengers and her ended up acting like a de-facto government when that was not the plan in the slightest. The first time Scarlett Witch, of all people, had called attention to what their actions might look like (setting up rudimentary transportation and communication networks, intervening in trade regulations, organising temporary housing and shelters; the list was endless), and how they fit with the Accords they’d spent a month collectively tip-toeing around and using hopelessly pleading language before Bruce, of all people, had declared that it wasn’t working, and then they’d gone back to operating the way Avengers usually did: asking for forgiveness rather than for permission. 

 

The working together was why she saw Steve so much. He’d handed off the shield to Sam, but he was possibly the one person everybody in the country trusted despite everything, so he ended up doing a lot of the coordinating between her and what was left of the government. He still couldn’t look her in the eye back then, and she wasn’t sure why, but he seemed to take some kind of comfort in seeing Morgan. Every time she came into work with Pepper, Morgan would greet Steve, and Steve would smile at her and ask about her day and generally do anything she asked him to do. Morgan loved him for it; she always wanted to talk to Steve and sit on his shoulders even if she’d been absolutely cross with everyone all day. 

 

At first, she wasn’t sure how she felt about it. Morgan deserved to have friends and people she liked. She didn’t get along so well sometimes with her classmates, so it was understandable that she sought affection elsewhere, but Steve? She deserved to have friends who weren’t years and years older than her, who hadn’t fought with her father and _fought_ _with_ her father, and anyway, why was Steve so invested in Morgan? Rhodey said that he’d lost the edge he’d always had to him before, that bit of fight that had always made him and Tony clash heads, but he was still a super soldier and still a significant part of the Avengers. It was true that he’d seemed to be handing off to Sam and the others more and more, but it wasn’t good for Morgan to be around more violence, and. She didn’t like it, was all. 

 

But Steve really was good with Morgan; she loved sitting on his shoulders and playing with him. And sometimes, when it was a bad day and she couldn’t look at Morgan’s bright brown eyes without being reminded of Tony, Steve would come and he would take her to the park or to the movies. She always felt horrible afterwards - allowing her daughter to go off with the man who carried her father’s body off a battle field - but it made it a little bit easier to keep going because although maybe the whole world rested on her shoulders, she could for one minute not be reminded of the reason it came to be that way. 

 

**THE BEGINNING**

 

The dots connect one evening while they’re at the Michigan house together, watching the evening news, which is a thing they do now. Morgan is at the drafting table, doing her math homework and drinking ice tea. Happy is next to her on the couch, solid and reassuring and stable as he talks her through the plot of some movie he went to see with Morgan and Steve. Steve is sprawled in an armchair in the corner, not quite inside the circle and not quite outside it. He’d picked Morgan up from school today because of the movie, and all of them still smell a little bit like popcorn. He’s holding his tablets in his hands but not looking at it, staring vaguely at the TV. The news is showing something about an Assembly that had happened in Chicago that afternoon, a squabble with a new group of villains calling themselves the Wrecking Crew. A short statement from Captain America - Sam-Captain, not Steve-Captain - plays, and she looks over at Steve to see his reaction. Usually, when they meet up and she asks him about the other Avengers, he looks kind of sad while pretending to cover it up. Bucky was his best friend, she knows, before the ice and Hydra and everything remade both of them into different people who don’t fit comfortably together any more. But Bucky is with Sam now and the two of them are running around wreaking havoc with the other New Avengers, and she knows that Bucky has gradually stopped coming to visit Steve. Somewhere after the world was running again and things had more or less stabilised, Steve had fallen through the cracks a little bit. No longer an Avenger but much too young for retirement, he’d just been hanging around New York, as far as she knows, taking art classes and coming to see them. It had taken forever before they became friends, and she still remembers the first day he called her Pepper and looked her in the eye. 

 

But now Steve just looks peaceful in that vaguely bored way, snorting slightly when he sees something happen on the TV. Then Morgan asks him, Steeeeve? in that special tone she has for him, and he gets up and walks over to her. He sits down next to her at the table and they begin to talk about multiplication tables, so Pepper turns her attention back to Happy’s arm thrown over her shoulders and the news on the TV. 

 

A little bit later, after the commercials have passed and some kind of bad romance movie has come on, she gets up to go to the bathroom and maybe grab a snack. Happy is almost asleep on the couch - he’s the only one of them still working full-time, trying to coordinate the security for all of SI - and Steve and Morgan have switched to peering at something on a tablet together. He’s patiently tapping away at the screen while Morgan gives advice, supersoldier-size fingers looking ridiculous in contrast with the millimetre sickness of the tablet, and that’s when it hits her. 

 

Steve would do - does do - anything and everything to please Morgan, because he didn’t do the same for Tony. She remembers when Tony came home one evening after spending the afternoon with the Avengers, somewhere early in 2013, maybe, and spent an hour complaining about how Steve wouldn’t accept any of his tech other than a few communicators for the team. Steve, she’s pretty sure, had initially hated all of the new stuff that Tony tried to push on him, and had at some point started refusing to like technology on principle, while Tony kept offering for the same reason. The both of them had been the same kind of stubborn asshole. 

 

She remembers, too, the fallout from the War - how Tony had locked himself in his workshop; the nightmares; the letter and phone that Rhodey told her existed but that she’d never seen; the alcohol; the calls from Natasha, who’d played mediator, and her carefully vague words about Steve. Natasha had never let Pepper hear about how Steve was taking it; at the time, she’d been grateful for that. He’d been in Wakanda then, but she knows that Bucky went into cryo almost immediately afterwards, and if- 

 

If Steve had been in love with Tony, then, that would explain the look on both of their faces at the reunion after the Snap. It would explain _everything_ about the War that she’d never been able to understand - why Steve had been so angry about Ultron and the Accords, why Tony had been so betrayed, why Steve had been so certain that no betrayal took place, why he’d been so devastated when he learnt it had. 

 

For a moment, she stands between the couch and the hall door and she can’t breathe. How dare Steve, the man Tony could never please, the only one he looked up to, the man who betrayed him so thoroughly and completely, who had hurt her husband a thousand times over, love him? How dare he love Tony, when all Steve had done was brought him tears and sorrow? Where’d he get the gall to sit here, talking to his daughter like he had the right-

 

She’d been the one to pick up Steve and Tony’s messes, to comfort Tony after their fights and placate SHIELD and fix everything, and if she’d been better at making them get along her husband probably would have been Steve’s.

 

Tony had loved Steve too, or had loved him once upon a time. She knew that, and it had been fine until now. She’d always had to share his love, with Rhodey, with Iron Man, with the rest of the world. She doesn’t doubt that he had loved her, too, that despite what the rumours said he had only ever been faithful. But she’d never known just how close she’d been to losing him, that if those two idiots had just gotten their act together they could have loved - and they would have loved, and maybe things would be different now. 

 

But now Tony is dead and Morgan is alive and Steve is here, doing his best to keep going. He’d put down Captain America and he’d lost Bucky again ( _again)_ and he’s here, with Morgan, frowning at the tablet as Morgan takes it from him with the air of someone who would _show_ Steve, geez, you’re so bad at this, patient and gentle and different. 

 

If Steve had loved Tony, and Tony had loved Steve, then in a certain sense she is not the only widow in this house. 

 

And now that she can breathe again, she thinks that maybe it isn’t fair to lay the blame for all of Tony’s pain and hurt at Steve’s feet. Sure, Steve had made mistakes, but Steve had been — twenty six? twenty seven? when he and Tony had first met, straight out of World War 2 and probably not in the best of moods. As much as she loved - loves - Tony, she can appreciate that he could be a contrary asshole when it suited him, as it probably had upon meeting Steve. Star crossed, she thinks, and has the inane urge to giggle. She is over fifty now, a mother and a widow,and another man had loved her husband. Her husband, who had flown around in a metal suit and gotten himself killed fighting a purple alien from space in a battle that still sometimes felt like the end of the world, and his lover, national icon frozen in ice for over seventy years and still looking like he’s thirty, in love like Romeo and Juliet. Very little of this makes sense. Perhaps it doesn’t need to. 

 

She’s been standing in between the hall and the couch for too long. Steve looks up while Morgan keeps playing with the tablet, raising one eyebrow in a quiet _everything_ _okay_? There’s no alarm in his face - the eyebrow is just an inquiry, extended to a friend, or maybe to a member of family. She can’t find it in herself to keep hold of her anger, her outrage, at his presence in the face of that eyebrow. Her husband is dead, but her daughter is not, and Steve is sitting at the table playing with her, and asking the woman who had married his love (good god, how many loves has this man had taken away from him? a voice asks in her head) if she’s all right. 

 

She smiles a yes, and continues on to the bathroom. She’ll have to ask Happy if he’ll repeat the plot of that movie again. Maybe when they see the next one, she’ll come with.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I definitely feel like Endgame hinted at a bit of Pepper/Happy in the epilogue there, and this fic decides to follow exactly that line of thought by being ambiguous. 
> 
> The science bit is complete bullshit. I borrowed my E&M teacher’s and my grandmother’s names to make it sound better. 
> 
>  
> 
> ~~I haven’t edited this completely yet but I wanted to turn it in before the deadline, so I might make some minor changes in a few days once I’ve had the time to look it over.~~
> 
> Now edited for stray commas and spelling errors. Thank you for all the kudos and comments!
> 
>  
> 
> Comments are loved and appreciated :)


End file.
